The word “disruption” gets tossed around so often in the tech blogosphere that it’s become practically meaningless. But there’s plenty of room in the world for legit disruption, i.e., starting a company that eats away at, and maybe even topples, a dominant industry.

The problem is that too many people set out to disrupt industries that they don’t understand. Often VCs worship the idea of a naive 20-year-old engineer who is unfamiliar how an old industry is set in its ways. It takes that kind of naiveté to shake up the old dominant players who aren’t incentivized to innovate, the thinking goes. Execs in the hospitality industry can list thousands of reasons why something like Airbnb would never work. It took a crazy, determined and somewhat desperate group of recent college grads to build something like Airbnb; now those same hotel execs are wondering if their businesses are under threat from the site and its many copycats.

Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify, has a similar tale of impossible thinking. Regarding his decision to take on the music industry, he said, “I’m naive enough to think things will always work out and I don’t fully understand how hard things are.” When he set out to make music more accessible legally than through pirated means, he had no idea how difficult his negotiations with the labels would be. As described in his PandoMonthly interview, Ek spent a harrowing few months camping out outside of executives offices before he got his first deals:

At a different PandoMonthly in New York, Chris Dixon explained this phenomena through the story of his first company, SideAdvisor. The startup solved a very simple problem back when malware and pop-up ads were common. Simple as it was, the problem was ripe for the picking because the overall security industry viewed it as a user education problem, not a weakness in their product offerings.

“I sort of came to it from a non-security perspective, which is why I saw it this way,” he said. “If you actually talk to security industry people, … they say, ‘Oh that doesn’t make sense. This isn’t what security companies do. That’s an education problem.’

“And that’s exactly why there was an opportunity, I think, is the fact that I was coming to it from from a non-security world and looking at it as a consumer internet problem and not a security problem,” he said.

These stories add to the myth that anyone who can spot a broken industry can jump in and fix it with a little elbow grease and hustle. Dixon noted he likes to ask the “Peter Thiel” question to founders his firm is interviewing: “Do you have a secret?” It means, do you know something about this industry, or market, or product, that no one else does?

The problem is there’s a lot of backstory to these tales of disruption that doesn’t get told. The second part of the “secret” question is just as important as the first. “Do you have a secret, and how did you earn your secret?” For Dixon’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, the decision to back a company is just as much about the founder as it is about his or her background and how it led up to that moment, Dixon said. With SiteAdvisor, Dixon’s background developing fintech software for Wall Street firms gave him insight into the security industry.

“You have to believe something that no one else believes, not because you decided to believe it but because you did something for years that led you to believe it and notice a pattern,” he said.

Two weeks after the event, that point about earning secrets has resonated with me. I’ve begun applying it to every founder I’ve met – how did they earn their secret? — and it’s telling. BuzzFeed’s secret is that sharing is the future of content distribution. Founder Jonah Peretti earned that through his own viral successes — BlackPeopleLoveUs.com, the Nike Sweatshop incident, the Rejection Hotline.

Nest’s secret is that people will adopt smart thermostats not necessarily for the environmental impact, but for their beautiful design. Founder Tony Fadell earned that secret designing beautiful hardware at Apple.

Asana’s secret is that collaboration and tools should be robust and easy to work with. Founder Dustin Moskovitz earned that while managing a huge team at Facebook.

But like all nuggets of wisdom, there are always exceptions. The biggest one is Mark Zuckerberg, whose secret was simply an insight into human behavior. Social networking wasn’t an industry yet. Zuckerberg noticed that people like to share photos of their parties. It wasn’t something he had to earn. It turned out to be a damn good secret.

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in Venture Capital Journal, BBC.com, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]